on Fashionising.com.

When Hemingway dubbed the City of Love a moveable feast he wasn’t exactly talking about literal plates piled high with lobsters, clamshells and french fries (though – if you hit up google – you can find the recipe to his most beloved burger, a literary-slash-culinary legend I’m determined to try some day.) Still, it’s Paris’ openness to ceaseless festivity and indulgence that allows a shoot…

You know that old line: Location, location, location. It can be as true for photoshoots as for where to pop up the latest Starbucks franchise. Location matters, but so, too, does making the absolute best use of it. In some unnamed hotel space that pits opulent furnishings against sanded back hardwood floors and provincial cabinets, Yves Kortum’s shoot for Bambi Magazine issue XVI brings the…

Horses are salt-soaked muscles with rising veins, iron and leather and pounding hooves, deep chests harnessed in surrender and restraint. At other times they’re the gentle sum of wide, quiet eyes and soft feathery manes, the nudge of a wet nose and the eagerness for company. It’s no wonder we can equate the noble creature equally to fetish or to femininity, as does the styling…

There’s some dark corner of Valentim Quaresma’s mind where twisted visions flourish, where objects are repurposed and reimagined, where fetish is not a dirty word but a basis for fashion. On the runway at ModaLisboa, Lisbon’s three-day festival of fashion, Quaresma presented designs that blurred jewellery and leather harness accessories, playing peek-a-boo with skin and turning dystopian elements of metal and bone into something newly…

They’re just a little bit unreal – these girls, these dolls. One’s a tin soldier in towering heels, a ballerina in barely-there tulle. One’s a racoon warrior in a metal mask, a jewellery box figurine. Their skin shines like wax, and their hair ignores gravity by moulding into architectural waves. You might even say these two beauties defy categorisation all together as, far from being…

Rough yet so incredibly delicate, heavy on bondage elements and cobbles of fragility alike, Nicolas Guerin‘s photo shoot for Wolf Magazine creates such a strong visual impact that is almost impossible to ignore. And it’s funny how at first sight you’re either struck by Sheri’s extraordinary beauty, hit by the delightful surge of exquisite floral prints, or drawn by the fetish rope fantasy that has…

It’s not about the desire to shock anymore, not since the bondage element has long morphed into a full statement of luxury, instead the modern fetishism is more about allowing sensuality to break new grounds, without fully abandoning the taste of forbiddance. Chokers, fishnets, thigh-high stockings and leather harnesses met Sidney Bristow’s androgynous beauty as photographed by Yves Kortum for Bambi Magazine, in a successful…

Can something that makes you uncomfortable also be beautiful? Can something that makes you uneasy turn you on? The answer to the second is a matter of personal taste. The answer to the first is, arguably, yes, as art that speaks a message can easily be both. In Peter Coulson‘s shoot Plastic, model Sally Ersch is mannequin-like. Lizzie Sharp’s makeup work leaves her with sunken…

We’re used to dressing according to the way we feel, even without necessarily realizing it at times. The garments we choose to put on have the power to reveal bits and pieces of what’s really hiding underneath the surface, particularly when they’re gifted with a story of their own. Mirroring the internal struggles between the highs and lows that humans go through on a daily…

Jessica Choay has a knack for turning a minimalist sweet of fabric into a roar of sensuality. We’ve seen that time and again with her lookbooks and campaigns, each one filled with dresses whose luxury is whispered in their immaculate cuts and beautiful fabrics, never needing to state their case with embellishments or heavy details. And so it stands to reason that if Choay was…